PayPal stock surged as much as 4.8% in Tuesday morning trading, reaching $55.12, after the payments company announced a partnership with Meta to bring the Muse AI shopping agent to its platform. Shares of PayPal Holdings, Inc. (PYPL) had been trading near $52.62 before the, and the spike came on heavy volume before the stock pulled back slightly.

With the integration live, PayPal customers can now use Muse personal AI agents to browse products and complete checkouts at participating merchants worldwide. The company announced the deal on social media platform X. Checkout access is what turns an AI assistant into a shopping agent — without a payments partner, an AI can recommend products but cannot complete a purchase on a user's behalf, which is why the platforms that control checkout have become the focus of the industry's race into agent-based commerce.

After the initial spike, PayPal shares settled in a range of roughly $53.69 to $53.95 in recent trading, up approximately 2% to 2.6% on the day. Meta stock also moved higher on the news, gaining around 1% on Tuesday to trade near $748.97.

The PayPal deal came one day after Shopify announced its own Muse partnership. Shopify said customers would be able to use Muse to find products from its merchants and complete purchases through Shop Pay. Shopify stock rose 7.2% on Tuesday to $147.83, building on a 7.3% gain from Monday, when the partnership was first reported. The back-to-back announcements put live Muse checkout on two major commerce platforms within roughly 24 hours.

Muse Gains Ground Fast

Meta's Muse AI agent has moved quickly since its release. Less than two weeks after launching, it claimed the top spot on Apple's U.S. App Store last Friday. App Store rankings track downloads rather than purchase activity, so the top spot reflects consumer adoption of the agent itself. That pace of adoption has pushed payment and commerce platforms to move fast on integrations, and both PayPal and Shopify are now live with Muse checkout capabilities.

Not everyone is on board, however. Amazon has blocked Muse from shopping on its website, a move that forms part of the company's wider push to stop rival AI shopping bots from making purchases on its platform.

PayPal and the Broader Picture

Payment apps have been racing to tie themselves to AI shopping models as consumer interest in agent-based shopping continues to grow. PayPal's new partnership places it alongside Shopify among the first major platforms to go live with Muse checkout, giving the company an early position in a fast-moving corner of online commerce.

Meta stock is up more than 11% since Monday, when the Shopify partnership was first announced.

The PayPal and Shopify integrations make Muse one of the few AI agents capable of completing real purchases end-to-end at scale. Its number ranking on the U.S. App Store as of Friday underlines how quickly consumer adoption has grown since the agent's release.

The rapid rollout highlights diverging responses to agent-based commerce across the industry. While PayPal and Shopify have opened their checkout flows to Muse, Amazon has moved to keep the agent out, reflecting a widening push by major retailers to control which AI shopping bots can make purchases on their platforms. How the rest of the industry lines up on that question is what to watch as agent-based shopping moves from concept to live checkout.